Sermon: "Once Upon a Time...."

West Newton Massachusetts

January 3, 2010

I wish that there were some wonderful place

Called the Land of Beginning Again,

Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches

And all of our poor selfish grief

Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door,

And never be put on again.

- Louisa Fletcher Tarkington, The Land of Beginning Again

Scripture Lessons:

Jeremiah 31:7-14

John 1:1-18

Once Upon a Time…

Two years ago, as I finished up my college degree and prepared to enter seminary, I took a job working in a bookstore in a local mall. The best part of the job was watching the faces of the children as they entered the store and ran to the Kids’ Section in the back, screeching in delight.

This was a section I could never keep in order. Often a child would enter in a frenzy and leave with a pile of books left scattered all over the floor. But I didn’t mind. For the kids it was like digging for treasure. After pulling everything off the shelves, they’d carry the book they’d chosen to the register and reach up on their tippy toes to set it on the counter, their eyes stretched wide with excitement.

Their frazzled parents would often complain about how many books the child already had at home and how quickly they’ll read this one before requesting yet another. Too often, the child never made it to the register, and instead was carried screaming from the store as the parent rattled off a list of errands they needed to run, and places they needed to be.

“We don’t have time for stories,” they’d say.

But their children knew better.

There is always time for a story.

We are a people who love stories.

When we hear the words:

Once upon a time…

In a land long ago…

In a galaxy far, far away…

We can’t help but prick up our ears and stop what we are doing.

Our full attention is given the source of these words.

Whether we read them on the printed page, see them scrolling across a movie screen, or hear them tripping off the tongue of a wizened elder, an exuberant child, or a stranger on the street.

One thing that all human beings have in common is the love of storytelling.

Before we even had language our species was scratching stick figure images onto cave walls because we couldn’t resist the urge to tell the story of our existence.

We drew pictures of the people we lived with and the animals that fed us, and the first hunters told tales of the one that got away. Storytelling was so easy, a caveman could do it.

With the development of language came not just the ability to give commands and express wants and needs verbally, but the ability to take those images off the cave walls and bring them to life in the minds of others using words alone.

Now some 35,000 years after the first cave drawings appeared, we’re still enamored by the art of story telling. In the form of books, movies, television, or theatre; and in good old-fashioned oral form – from stories passed on from generation to generation, to a simple retelling of what we did over the weekend.

Whether tales of truth or fiction, it is through story that we put aside the harsh realities of our own lives, and live vicariously through the experiences of others.

When we hear a story, we often put ourselves in the place of the characters involved and imagine how the plot would unfold with us in the driver’s seat, or we see our own lives mirrored in the stories of others and we feel a little less alone in the world.

You each have a book in front of you right now that is said to contain the Greatest Story Ever Told. If we got around to cracking its pages every once and a while we’d see that there’s stuff in there to rival even the most gripping of mystery novels, the most exciting of adventure movies, and the most voyeuristic of reality TV.

The Bible is the collective effort of a people living in a particular time and place, to explain how our world - how WE - came to be.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep…Then God said let there be light, and there was light, and God saw that the light was good.” (Genesis 1:1-4)

These are the opening words of the Torah, the beginning of what we Christians call the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, we hear an echo of this creation story in the opening words of the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

While the opening words of Genesis tell the story of our beginning, the opening words of the Gospel of John tell the story of Jesus’ beginning. This, believe it or not, is John’s version of the Christmas story.

This is not the story we’re accustomed to hearing.

While Matthew and Luke tell the story of Jesus’ birth using imagery that is identifiably from the human experience, John has another story in mind. In John’s version of the Christmas story there are no shepherds, no traveling wise men or guiding stars. Instead, John takes us all the way back to the formless void that we encountered in Genesis.

In the beginning there was God, AND in the beginning there was the Word.

For John, the Word, or Logos of God, did not enter into our history when the baby Jesus drew his first breath in a cold and lowly manger. The Word has been with us, with God, since the beginning.

Now truth be told, for many of us this is point in the story where our eyes usually glaze over.

We can relate to stories of shepherds, overcrowded inns, and newborn babies. And while some us struggle with the idea of angelic apparitions and virgin births, Matthew and Luke’s Christmas stories are at least told in a language that we can understand.

In comparison, John may as well be speaking in a foreign tongue.

As one seminary professor told his students:

“'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God?' How do you explain this in a sermon? You can't. You could say those words every day for the rest of your life and still not understand them."

Which is probably why Richard left the preaching for me today.

In reality, the author of John’s gospel WAS speaking in a foreign tongue.

He was speaking to a Greek audience who lived in the waning years of the first century.

In John’s time the philosophy of Hellenism was in vogue, and thus he employed the language of Hellenism – using words like Logic, light, and life - to tell the story of Jesus to a people who would have found it difficult to relate to the older, culturally specific language found in the earlier gospels.

In contemporary terms, we can imagine that Matthew and Luke were writing for rural farmers and blue-collar city dwellers in the 1950’s, while John is a modern day professor of Philosophy writing for an audience of university students and college professors.

And yet while many of us here, are now or have been university students or college professors, our eyes still glaze over when we read the Gospel of John.

The passage from Jeremiah that we heard this morning, while also written for another time and another people, is much easier for us to comprehend.

Because it tells a story that we recognize and can relate to.

Jeremiah 31 is essentially the story of the prodigal son told on a national scale.

Those who had been scattered to far away lands were to be gathered back together.

God told Jeremiah:

“With weeping they shall come,

and with consolations I will lead them back” (Jeremiah 31:9)

Jeremiah 31 carries a message of hope. It comes near the end of a book that consists primarily of dire predictions of the evil that would befall the nation of Judah over its refusal to follow the covenant of Moses. But in chapter 31 a ray of hope bursts forth – although Judah’s people will have to face exile and punishment for their misbehavior, God makes the promise that once the punishment has brought about the desired humbling effect, the people of Judah will once again be restored to their beloved Promised Land. The end of the story will read: “And they lived happily ever after.”

Like many of the ‘happily ever after’ tales found in the Bible, Jeremiah 31 is a promise for the future. We read these stories and identify with the suffering and the isolation and recognize that although we, like the people of Judah, are still living in the middle of the story there is hope to be found in the end yet to come. But how does the promise of a happily ever after help us in the here and now?

How does a promise made to a people living some 2600 years ago, a promise of a utopia that has yet to be realized, have any bearing on how we live today?

For one possible answer, lets return to the opening words of the Gospel of John.

“The Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:1,14)

All four writers of the gospels agree that Jesus is the embodiment of the hope that is yet to come. Jesus is the Happily Ever After. Jesus is a physical manifestation of the divine presence that we are meant to be, the example that we are meant to follow, the vehicle by which we are meant to come to know God. It is through following Jesus that we make our way to the Promised Land.

In literary terms, the birth of Jesus is the climatic moment in the Christian story. Everything that came before, from Genesis onward, was merely foreshadowing of what was to come.

But while Matthew and Luke have Jesus entering in the middle of our story, and returning at the end, John writes him in at the beginning.

While it can be argued that this was John’s way of blatantly expressing a belief that the other gospel writers merely danced around – the belief that Jesus was in fact God incarnate, I would offer another interpretation.

One that relies not on the language of philosophy but on the language of story.

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, a baby is born.

A baby that in many ways is just like you and me, and in many ways is the personification of who we are meant to be. This baby embodies the hope and potential that each new life has to offer the world. Yet this baby does not come into this world alone. This baby has guardians, teachers, companions and friends. This baby is born helpless just as we all are, and without the gift of human love and compassion, this baby will never grow to be the guiding light that many will come to rely on. This baby is the expression of God’s love and grace entering into the world, and it is up to us to nurture it to fruition.

One way of interpreting the opening words of the Gospel of John is to recognize that this baby is not one life but ALL life. Genesis tells us that God spoke the world into existence; Creation itself is the Word of God. John tells us that the Word is the conduit by which God enters humanity and writes sacred history into our history. John writes:

“The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (John 1:2-4)

For John, the human being that we came to know as Jesus was the ultimate personification of the Word, but the Word has been with us from the beginning. We might say, the Word is the life in each of us.

Admittedly, this is not the traditional way to interpret John’s gospel, as John most certainly believes that Jesus alone is the personification of the divine Word. In fact, in this respect John’s portrayal of Jesus is radically different then the other gospels.

John’s Jesus knows who he is and is not secretive at all when it comes to making sure everyone else knows it too. John’s Jesus performs a multitude of miracles; he teaches using truth statements rather than parables; and while he expresses emotions as evidence of his humanity, characteristically he is more God-like than he is human.

Personally, I prefer Matthew, Mark and Luke’s portrayal of Jesus. The Jesus who upset the status quo by telling stories and asking pointed questions; the Jesus who cried out in anguish in the garden as he prayed; the Jesus who questioned God and asked to be let off the hook when the time came for him to fulfill the divine plan. I prefer the Jesus who came into the world the same way that we do – wide-eyed and screaming, and who left the world the same way that we do – with a mixture of joy and pain, and uncertainty and hope.

The reality is that none of the gospels gives us a complete picture of who Jesus really was. Journalistic accuracy, while important to us, was of little concern to the writers of the gospels, the point was to tell the story of Jesus in a way that would resonate with the audience each was addressing. The point was to make the story come alive for the listener, with poetic license fully invoked.

Ultimately, it is through story telling that we look to the heavens and ask:

“What is the meaning of life?” “What is our purpose?” “What ending are we working towards?” And it is through storytelling that we explore all the possible answers. Through religion, science and philosophy we craft different stories containing a multitude of answers to these questions.

As individuals some of these stories resonate with us, while others do not.

Like children rummaging through storybooks on a bookshelf we choose the one that has the most colorful pictures and the plot line that makes us want to hear it again and again.

We choose the story that speaks to us.

In the story that resonates with me, God answers our questions by becoming one of us. In this story, the purpose of Jesus’ incarnation, the Word made flesh, was not just to point to a future hope, a far-off happily ever after, like the one that God promised Jeremiah many years ago.

God became one of us to show us that living was our purpose.

The meaning of life, is life itself.

Complete with the joy and the pain; the laughter and the tears; the beginnings and the endings.

In this story God says: ‘The Promised Land is the land on which you now stand. Make of it what you will, and I will be right there with you offering strength and assurance.’

God created us to live out the story of creation. In a way, we are the Word made flesh. Just as God spoke us into existence, we speak God into existence through our actions and our words.

As we come together today to celebrate the continuation of the Christmas story, the birth of a new year, and the baptism of a new member of the body of Christ, it’s as good a time as any to think about the story that resonates with us.

What story do we choose to take off the shelf and read again and again?

And just as importantly, what story are we helping to create?

What plot lines would we like to begin, and which ones do we need to bring to an end?

How do our stories intertwine with those around us, and how might we interject some of our God given love and compassion into the stories of those who find it lacking?

What world do we imagine when hear the words: “Once Upon a Time…”

And how can we work together, to write our own, “Happily Ever After.”

Amen

Sermon: "People Get Ready"

West Newton, Massachusetts
November 29, 2009

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, you hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens.
Advent is the name of that moment.”
— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Scripture Lessons:
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Luke 21:25-36

“People Get Ready”

When I was six years old, it was during Advent that I became well acquainted with the word anticipation.

In church every Sunday we’d watch the lighting of the Advent wreath, eagerly counting how many candles were left to burn.
A few weeks before Christmas, my father would bring home the tree and lean it against the back of the garage, and we'd wait for the day when we would haul it into the living room, cover it with lights and tinsel, and pull out the tattered box containing my mother's fragile glass ornaments from the 1950's, marveling at how much prettier they were then all the others.
And like many children of the 1970’s, during Advent I spent an inordinate amount of time pouring over the pages of the Sears and Roebuck Christmas catalog. Imagining how complete my life would be if I found a Barbie Dream House AND a GI Joe Headquarters under the tree.

Yes, when I was six years old it was during Advent that I became well acquainted with the word anticipation.

I have a vivid memory of lying awake on Christmas Eve night. The cold wind rattling against the windowpane, while the old radiator in the corner of my bedroom clanked and clanged filling the room with a dry hissing heat.
I lay perfectly still under the covers. Not daring to move.
My eyes clenched shut but my ears wide open.
Straining to hear beyond the rattling and the clanking, to every sound that did not belong. Every creak, every knock, every thump on the ceiling above had me convinced that St. Nicholas and his reindeer had arrived, and Christmas had finally come.

Oh, if only we as adults could await the arrival of Christ with the same anticipation and excitement of a six-year-old waiting for Santa Claus.

Advent for many of us is unfortunately a time of hurried business, as we prepare for Christmas day with shopping, cooking, decorating and traveling. We pack our schedules with visitations, parties and pageants, and while we enjoy the ride we can’t wait for December 26th to arrive, when we can stop, put our feet up and exhale for the first time since Thanksgiving Day.
The anticipation associated with Advent is there humming in the background as we make our holiday preparations, but we have to ask ourselves, what is it that we’re preparing for?

Now, lest you think this is going to be yet another Advent sermon bemoaning the fact that we’ve lost the true meaning of Christmas to the evils of consumerism, think again –
That’s a road that’s been trod down too many times before,
and in the enduring words of Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by…

Advent is when we typically talk about anticipation and hope as we await the birth of the Christ Child, but this week’s scripture readings have something ELSE in store for us.
Before we head off running down Main Street toward yet another Christmas, decking the halls and singing songs of joy as we go, we’re going to take a little detour down the road less traveled by - as we talk not about the first advent, but the second advent.

The word Advent means “arrival” or “coming.”
Every year on the first Sunday of Advent the lectionary gives us a text that deals not with the first coming of Jesus, but the second coming. Right off the bat we’re reminded that the anticipation we feel as we prepare for the arrival of the newborn babe in the manger is only part of the story.
Before we get to the beginning, we have to look at the ending - and as modern day Christians, particularly here in the United Church of Christ, we tend not to dwell too long on the ending

We love the story – During Advent we spend a whole month preparing for Jesus’ birth, and in the spring, during Lent, we spend another month preparing for his death, but there’s a whole other part of the story that we would prefer to just skim over, if we give any attention to it all.
But in reality this is the part of the story that we’re preparing for, this is the Advent - the coming - that we’re anticipating.
The first Advent, the birth of Christ, has already happened. It’s a past event for us.
It’s the Second Advent, the return of Christ to this world - this is the event that lies in our future.

Yet we can’t bring ourselves to talk about it.
Because it involves a cataclysmic change that we just can’t wrap our minds around.
It involves terminology and theology that for many of us is not part of our every day vocabulary or our confessed beliefs. It’s where we encounter words like Eschatology - Armageddon – Apocalypse – and Parousia (which is just a fancy word for ‘second-coming’).
Words like these often catch in our throats as we say them, or need to be proceeded by qualifiers like “some people believe” or “the tradition has it.” But no matter what words we use to describe this future event, the result of the cataclysmic change that both Jesus and Jeremiah predict in our scripture readings today involves the end of the world as we have come to know it.

Perhaps the reason why we’re reluctant to talk about it is because we don’t quite understand what “the end” means. But as any good storyteller knows, endings often lay the groundwork for extraordinary new beginnings.

The prophet Jeremiah tells us:
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” (33:14-15)

And in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says:
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (21:25-26)

This is apocalyptic language.
Apocalypse is another word for “unveiling” or “revealing.”
Apocalyptic writings revealed the things to come.
Viewed in its historical context, this is the language of a people who are experiencing a cataclysmic event or pain that they have no other means to comprehend. It is the language of a people who feel persecuted and small, to the point where they express their hope for deliverance, and their trust in the God who is really in charge of everything, by speaking in large, dramatic terms. How else would God upend the power of something as mighty as the empires of Babylon and Rome than by doing big things in big ways, even bringing down the heavenly bodies from their orbits?
For people in need of a dramatic reshuffling of the cosmic deck, metaphorical images like the moon and stars falling out of the sky signify the end of one age and the birth of another.

In our time we may leave apocalyptic language such as this to the writers of the Left Behind series or to our Christian brothers and sisters on the opposite end of the theological spectrum, but seeing worldly events as having apocalyptic meaning was fairly common in first century Jerusalem, as it was in Jeremiah’s time some 600 years prior.

Jeremiah’s words sent a mixed message to the struggling nation of Judah. In the aftermath of the destruction of the first Temple, his words were both comforting and distressing. The people liked the parts about Yahweh’s protection and coming reign. They did not like the part about exile and laying down their strategies of resistance against the power of Babylon. Jeremiah’s words offered hope, but not the kind of hope they were looking for.
They wanted to act, and he was telling them to wait.
Be patient for just a while longer – a Messiah will soon come to set us free.

600 years later, the author of the gospel of Luke offered his first-century readers a similar message. The apocalyptic passage that we heard today from Luke is also found in the gospel of Mark, but in Mark it carries a greater sense of urgency. In Mark’s gospel, the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem was to be a sure sign that the end times had begun. Yet, unlike Mark, who wrote his apocalyptic predictions soon after Jerusalem fell to Rome, the author of Luke wrote his gospel some 15-20 years later.
If the destruction of the Temple was to be THE sign that the end of the world was soon to follow, why had the end not yet come? Why were the people of God still suffering when Christ had supposedly set them free?

This is a question that has echoed down through the ages.
Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” Yet twenty years later, the generation who had heard Jesus’ claim with their own ears, began to die off, and the people began to ask, “Why has the end not yet come?”

Another twenty years went by, Jerusalem fell, and Mark said surely this is a sign that the apocalypse has begun!
But again the people were left to ask, “Why has the end not yet come?”

Twenty years after that, the author of Luke said the fall of Jerusalem was NOT the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the time of the Gentiles, for the Gentiles were now invited into God’s covenant along with Israel, and both were called to hear the Good News that the Kingdom of God is near.
Fast forward through 2000 years, and a multitude of doomsday predictions that have yet to come true, and still the people ask: “Why has the end not yet come?”

Some would respond, when Jesus said “this generation” shall not pass, he was referring collectively to all the generations that will live between the first and second comings.
We are still in that time, the time in-between, the time of the Gentiles and the Church. The end will come when all have heard the Good News.

Others would say that it is not our place to even ask WHY the end has not yet come.
Jesus said that even he did not know when it would occur; only God was privy to that information. It is enough for us to know that we need to keep alert, to be on guard, for the Kingdom will come when we least expect it.

As writer and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor describes it:
Jesus will come like a thief in the night,
“with a wool cap pulled down low on his head and socks on his feet so that you do not even know he is there, until you wake up to the sound of someone breathing over you in your bed.
You can lock your windows and deadbolt your door, there is no way to keep him out. All he has to do is watch you, and you will show him the way in.”

But as Jesus tip toes in without a sound, the Kingdom of God will arrive with a mighty roar. As Luke tells us, just as the budding leaves on a fig tree announce the arrival of summer, the shaking of the heavens and the earth will announce the arrival of the Kingdom of God.
And there is no reason to fear when this happens, for it is Good News that this day will soon be here!

But for those of us sitting here comfortably or uncomfortably in the twenty-first century with our mortgaged homes, upwardly mobile careers, and 401K retirement plans, this is not good news; in fact it’s rather disturbing news. This is not the future that we are planning for.
Few of us have a ten-year plan that includes the Apocalypse.

But to the first century fishermen and artisans living under the oppression of Roman rule, to hear Jesus say that soon all of this will be gone - this was GOOD NEWS.
Soon, it would all be over, the persecution, the poverty, the pain. All of it will pass away and be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. Where there will be no more gnashing of teeth, no more tears. Death itself, will be defeated, and humankind will be redeemed, restored to its original form as one who is made perfect in the image of God.

We don’t have to be a first century fisherman to welcome Jesus’ promise of the coming of the Kingdom of God. There’s plenty of poverty, persecution and pain in this century to understand why there is a need for an apocalypse – a revelation of things to come. There are plenty of us who are teetering close enough to the edge that we’d welcome the sight of Jesus descending from the clouds, as the world as we knew it crumbled beneath our feet.
Because we know the second part of the promise is that a new world will grow in its place.
A world free of war, poverty, and disease.
A world where greed, genocide, violence, oppression, and injustice in all its forms no longer exist. A world where love conquers fear, hope conquers despair, and light conquers darkness.

But isn’t this the world we’re already anticipating?
Isn’t this the world we’re working towards making a reality, right here, right now?
Isn’t this the world we see when we say our faith calls us to make the world a better place?
Isn’t this the world we help to bring into being every time we help our neighbor, love our enemy, give to the poor, spend time with the sick, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, and stand up for those who are oppressed, marginalized or suffering injustice?

As members of the United Church of Christ we may not spend much time thinking about the end times, or worrying about the impending signs of the apocalypse.
But we do know how to envision the Kingdom of God.

My suggestion during this Advent season is that we take the time to sit with our anticipation of the things to come.
To spend just as much time thinking about what the second coming might bring, as we do fussing over the details of what the first coming has already given us.
To step off the well-trodden path lined with Christmas lights and Nativity scenes, and take a stroll down the road less traveled by. To wander down the darkened road of what will be.

If we do this often enough, perhaps, just perhaps, we may find ourselves lying awake one Christmas Eve night, with our eyes clenched shut and our ears wide open, listening for the sounds that don’t belong.....the thump on the roof, the creak in the floorboard, the breath in our ear, the cries of joy rising up from the world outside, letting us know that the Kingdom of God has finally come.
Amen.




*Barbara Brown Taylor quote from Home by Another Way, 1999

And they're off!

Today is the first day of classes of the new seminary year…and so far it’s been oddly peaceful. After being home for 4 months (living on a semi-busy road with airplanes zooming over our roof) I’d forgotten how quiet it can be up here on campus. My first class isn’t until 6 pm so I’ve eased into the day by sleeping late and going for a walk around the lake.

I had a busy weekend - driving back up to Boston on Thursday, participating in new student orientation events on Friday and Saturday, and attending Worship at my Field Ed church on Sunday. But so far this semester is shaping up to be a lot less hectic then my previous two, at least academically.

I’m taking 3 classes instead of 4 because of my 15-hour-a-week Field Ed obligation, and after looking at the syllabuses the workload is much lighter than most of my previous classes. My “History of American Religion” class doesn’t even have a reading assignment until the 3rd class, and each of my three classes has only 3 or 4 papers/projects which are well spaced out over the semester – As opposed to last semester when it seemed like I had a paper due every week in addition to writing sermons for preaching class and doing group projects for my Worship class. And thankfully, the main text for my New Testament class is the same one I used in my undergrad New Testament class so I’ve got my fingers crossed that we’ll be sailing into waters that I’ve already charted, thus easing the work-load/stress-factor even more. I do have an additional 1-½ hour Field Ed ‘small group’ class that meets every week in conjunction with my Educational Ministry class. It will require some writing but it will mainly be listening and discussion.

I expect things to get hectic soon enough once I get into the swing of Field Ed, but even my Field Ed church is taking its time getting up to speed.
I know quite a few students here on campus who’ve already started at their Field Ed sites, even participating in Worship this past Sunday, while mine is having difficulty getting their Teaching Parish Committee together to have our initial meeting. We’re tentatively scheduled to meet next Sunday, but the Field Ed Supervisor, who also happens to be the Pastor, still has a “new supervisor” education requirement to fulfill before he we can have our first one-on-one meeting. And until I meet with him and get an idea as to how open he is to my participating in some of the things that I’d like to participate in (pastoral care/counseling, weddings/baptisms/funerals) and get a feel for how often he’ll let me preach, I can’t really work on my “Learning Agreement” with the Teaching Parish Committee. The Learning Agreement is what spells out exactly what tasks I’ll be performing and how many hours a week I’ll be doing them.

He did tell me yesterday that he’s going on vacation in 2 weeks and he wants me to fill-in as liturgist (a member of the congregation is preaching). At this church the Pastor performs all the liturgical duties (Welcome, Call to Worship, Invocation, Confession, Offertory) in addition to the Pastoral Prayer, Lord’s Prayer and Benediction, and a lay reader does the scripture reading. So I suppose this will be my first official duty as a Field Ed student. Of course while he was telling me this what was running through my head was: “What pastor goes on vacation 2-weeks into the new church year? Isn’t that what summer is for?”

Oh well, I suppose I should be grateful that I have the opportunity to ease into this new school year, and not feel like I’m being pulled in six different directions right from the get go. Now, I’m going to enjoy the rest of this beautiful afternoon and plant myself in an Adirondack chair on the quad and read. Something deep and theological….like a Star Trek novel.

Sermon: "Messy Jesus"

King Street UCC, Danbury CT
August 23, 2009
“Messy Jesus”
John 6:56-69

When I was about 8-years-old, and my brother Larry was 7, we awoke one morning and much to our joy discovered that a new house was being built just up the street.
Larry and I stood on the sidewalk and watched in amazement as the workers dug a giant hole for the foundation.
They worked for hours piling the dirt sky high, until the end of the day when they packed up their equipment and left the lot unattended.

My mother, who must have seen the gleam in our eyes, told us that we were not to go anywhere near that construction site.
You know that wasn’t going to happen.
There was a huge pile of dirt, and a giant hole in the ground.
What kid could resist that?
Sure enough, only an hour later she caught us playing on the pile of dirt.
My mother dragged us home warning us that if she caught us out there again there would be hell to pay.
Well, my mother never actually used the word “hell,” but saying there would be heck to pay just doesn’t have the same effect.

The next day, the hole got even bigger, and we watched as the workers poured concrete around the sides.
And once the workers packed up and left for the day,
Larry and I were right back up on that pile of dirt.

We’d run to the top using our hands to claw our way up, and then we’d slide back down the other side. We played King of the Hill, Moses on the Mountain, and invented creative ways to propel ourselves from top to bottom – face first, feet first, sideways, upside down. We had dirt in our teeth, dirt in our ears, we even had dirt in our underwear, but we didn’t care.

After a day spent in the hot summer sun, the dirt was cool on our skin.
And joy was found in the moment we became airborne as we launched ourselves off the top of the pile.

Then Larry and I heard our mother calling us home for dinner.
We quickly ran off the lot so she wouldn’t catch us in the act and then we casually skipped on home as if we had spent the afternoon lying on our backs watching the clouds roll by.

But as we skipped up the front walk our mother flew out the screen door and held up her hand stopping us in our tracks.
We were a mess.
We were covered in dirt from head to toe. Our hair was plastered down with sweat, our faces were flushed and our knees and elbows were scraped and bloodied.
My mother looked at us with fury in her eyes and said,
“Have you been playing at that construction sight again?”
Larry and I looked at each other, then back up at our mother,
And in unison we said, “Noooooo, we weren’t anywhere near that pile of dirt, honest!”



My brother and I were covered in dirt from head to toe, yet we tried to deny it. Much the same as the disciples did in our scripture reading today.

The disciples had been with Jesus from the beginning, following him from town to town, watching him heal the sick, raise the dead, and mingle with the likes of prostitutes and tax collectors.
They stood off at a distance and watched as this crazy preacher man predicted the end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God.
And they got up close and personal as they watched him wipe sweaty brows, touch diseased skin, and rub spit and dirt into a man’s eyes to help him to see.

They watched Jesus put his hands in the muck of life and dig right in.

If you think about it, Jesus’ hands must have been quite a sight.
Rough and dry from a lifetime spent in the desert sun, his cuticles split and his palms scarred from years of working with wood, surely there was dirt under his fingernails and dirt ground into the swirls of his fingertips.
But it wasn’t so much the condition of Jesus’ hands, but rather what he did with them that irked his detractors. Jesus broke every purity law the Pharisees came up with, yet the people continued to follow him… because they sensed that there was something about him that would set them free.

By the middle of John’s gospel the crowd following Jesus has swelled to 5000 plus, as we heard in the lectionary a few weeks ago.
A moving mass of humanity, pushing against each other and reaching out to receive the bread and fish as it passed through Jesus’ calloused hands.

The masses continued to follow Jesus as long as he fed them and kept them entertained.
But when he turned to teach them, they began to drift away.
Jesus said to them,
'I am the Bread of Life . . . whoever eats this Bread will always live.'
And those who did not believe in resurrection or eternal life, slowly wandered away.
Then Jesus said,
“I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father."
And those who were turned off by his claim that he, a mere human being, was on the same level as God, also turned and walked away.
Then Jesus said,
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
And the crowd of 5000 dwindled back down to 12.

Jesus’ disciples pulled him aside and said,
Master, what are you doing?
We had a good thing going here, the people were hanging on your every word, watching your every move, then you have to go off and spout some nonsense about living forever and eating your flesh and drinking your blood?
Do you blame them for walking away?
This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?

And then Jesus responds with one of the most confrontational lines he’s ever spoken to the disciples,
Jesus said, “Does this offend you?”

Jesus went on to say:
If this bothers you, how are you going to react when it’s crunch time and you’re picking my broken body up off the ground?
How are you going to react when I’m nailed up on that cross begging God to end my pain?
How are you going to react when I return three days later proving that death no longer has a hold on you, that with God you will live forever?
Those who walked away in disgust have already proven that they cannot stomach what I have to say, or what is to come,”
and then Jesus looked the disciples straight in the eye and said,
“Do you wish to also go away?”


How would we respond to these questions?
Does this offend you?
Do you wish to also go away?

There was a time when my answer to these questions was, yes.
I am offended and I do wish to go away.
Like many young people I left the church behind only to come back to it years later.
But even now, when Jesus starts talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood I get nervous.
As a former Catholic, today’s scripture reminds me too much of what I left behind.

In the Catholic tradition, the bread and wine is not just a symbol of Christ, it is believed that the elements transform into the actual body and blood of Christ.
This teaching is difficult, and I could not accept it.
I also couldn’t accept the image of Jesus I was shown in my youth.
In the church and school I attended we didn’t have a plain cross hanging above the altar, we had a crucifix.
A 7” tall wooden crucifix with the very real, and very dead body of Jesus hanging on it.
As a child, kneeling in the pew and looking up at the altar, that’s the image of Jesus that I knew.
I could see the sweat beading on his brow, and the blood dripping from the wound in his side, and from the thorns on his head.
I also recall seeing the image of a grief stricken Mary, sitting with the lifeless body of her son draped across her lap, her arms cradling him, just as she did when he was a child.


In the UCC we like to say that the message of Christianity is not about how Jesus died, but how he lived.
We focus on his teachings of hope, and love, and justice.
Not on his death.
A dead Jesus, a dying Jesus, a Jesus who talks about us eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a messy Jesus.
It’s too corporal, too visceral, it has too much of a ‘cringe’ factor to it.

Unfortunately, many of us in today’s world are too far removed from the corporal nature of life to understand what Jesus was on about when he was talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
As a culture, we have become overly squeamish.

Our media is full of images of beauty and youth, we do all we can to hide the sick and the dying from our view, and only 2% of our population still lives on farms, where children learn at a young age that blood and flesh and death are a natural part of life.

I grew up on Long Island, where meat came shrink wrapped on Styrofoam trays and cost 59 cents a pound at the A&P.
We did have a local take-out restaurant that had a poultry farm in the rear, with chickens, turkeys, and even a peacock on display, but I made no connection between the entertainment that the farm supplied and the bucket of fried chicken that my mother was picking up for our dinner inside.

Which is why all this talk of flesh and blood makes me nervous.
When I read books like Fast Food nation, or the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which contain graphic accounts of slaughterhouse conditions and how the food we eat actually gets to our tables, I just want to stick my fingers in my ears and say “La La La La La, I can’t hear you!”

When Jesus talks about drinking his blood, and eating his flesh, I want to do the same.
And I suspect that I’m not alone.

Now we know that Jesus lived in a different time, and he was speaking to a people who understood the world in a much different way then we do.
The ancient civilizations of our own sacred history conceal a fair amount of blood.
Human sacrifice, of children and virgins, was not uncommon in ancient Israel. Which is why Abraham tied Isaac to an altar at God’s command without batting an eye. It was part of the culture. That is until God told him that sacrifice of the innocents was no longer necessary.

With the rise of Judaism, animal sacrifice became the norm.
It is important to remember that the temple in which Jesus walked was soaked in blood. Daily sacrifices of goats, lambs and doves were part of the standard worship program.

The point is that Jesus was speaking to a first century audience.
Everyone in his time knew about animal sacrifice, whether it was in the temple at Jerusalem or in pagan temples in Corinth or Rome.

It was natural for Jesus to speak of his own impending death in those terms, and it made sense for the first Christians to memorialize his death in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, using language that identifies it with the sacrificial ritual they all knew.
Unlike those of us today who cringe when we hear the words “eat my flesh, and drink my blood” Christians in the first century understood that Jesus was speaking metaphorically.

Jesus wanted us to consume him. To take him into our bodies so he would become a part of every fiber of our being.
To internalize his Words, and his actions and most importantly, his love.
He wanted us to understand that as we are flesh, he is flesh.
He feels our pain, he knows our suffering, and by making his flesh and blood a part of own we will know his suffering as well.

Jesus wanted us to grasp this teaching fully, which is why he used language that was so bodily focused and why he used that same language while performing the ritual he asked us to do in his name.
Jesus said,
Do this in remembrance of me and become like me in the process.


The language Jesus uses in our scripture reading today made sense to the early Christians. But those who stood outside the early church were just as befuddled as we are.
In today’s reading from John we hear an echo of the beginning estrangement between Christians and Jews. John’s gospel proclaims that Jesus is the only sacrifice that God demands, the priests and the temple sacrifices are no longer needed.

It is interesting to note that Jews and pagans alike would come to distrust the Christians’ Eucharist.
Because it was done behind closed doors with only baptized Christians allowed to participate, rumors began to fly about secret rituals, human sacrifice and cannibalism. Outsiders had only the written word to go by – eat my flesh, drink my blood – with no first hand experience to reveal the true meaning of the text. Taken literally, this text was proof that Christians were cannibals.

For this reason, early Christians were mistrusted, shunned, persecuted, and killed.
Then as now, refusing to acknowledge metaphor can be deadly—literalism can literally kill you.

This is something we still fear today.
We fear that outsiders may take our words, our scriptures, literally.
Or we fear that we may be confused with Christians who do take them literally.
Or we ourselves may take them literally because we’ve never had anyone give us reason not to, and yet the literal meaning of the words just doesn’t fit with our understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
So we ignore them, skip over them, push them into the back of the closet.

And when we run across scripture like today’s lectionary reading, we want to stick our fingers in our ears and say “La La La La La, I can’t hear you!”

But lets face it, the Bible is a messy book, full a lot of not so nice things that we would rather not have in there - rapes, murders, baby killings - and we can’t blame it all on the Old Testament while we hold up our shiny, clean New Testament for all to see.
Jesus is messy too. He says things that we just cannot accept.
And we’d rather not be associated with that Jesus.



How many of you have seen the Capitol One credit card commercial where a mother and her son are trying to choose a picture of him to put on her credit card?
The boy, named Jimmy, is about 9-year-old, and he is determined to have his mother not choose a picture that could potentially embarrass him every time she hands her credit card to a sales clerk. He wants her to choose the picture of him in his karate uniform, where he’s looking tough and cool. She wants to use the picture of him taken when he was a 3-year-old sitting in a high chair with a bowl of spaghetti dumped over his head. In the commercial mother and son go back and forth shooting down each other’s alternative choices until much to his chagrin, Karate Jimmy loses and Spaghetti Jimmy wins!

We do the same with our Christian faith.
The Bible is a messy book.
There are a lot of images in there that we wouldn’t want displayed on our credit card as a representation of who we are, or what we believe.
So we do our best to ignore or eliminate those images that don’t fit in with our modern understanding of the world, or who we are.

We don’t want Spaghetti Jesus on our credit card.
Spaghetti Jesus, messy Jesus, tells us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Messy Jesus talks about being raised from the dead, he casts out demons and walks on water, Messy Jesus parades around with a sign that reads Repent! The end is near! While we cross over to the other side of the street and pretend that we don’t know him.

At least that’s who messy Jesus is for those of us who call ourselves liberal Christians.
For other Christians, messy Jesus is the one who cavorts with sinners, treats women as equals, tells us to love our enemies, and forgives those who have wronged him.

Regardless of our theological leanings, there are some things that Jesus says or does that we just can’t wrap our heads around.
Like the disciples we say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?"

And Jesus’ response to us is the same:
“Does this offend you? Do you also want to go away?”
Jesus never said that following him was going to be easy.
And he intentionally gave us challenging teachings to separate the faithful from the pretenders.

He knew that being intellectually committed to God was not enough, we also need to be emotionally, spiritually, and physically committed to God.
By invoking the image of blood and flesh, and creating a ritual that had us eating and drinking, Jesus had us to move out of our minds and into our mouths, our bodies,
To not just contemplate or think about our faith but to taste it, to smell it, to feel it.


But we can’t do that without showing a willingness to get messy.
A willingness to get our fingers sticky and our hands dirty.
To have crumbs on our chin and the smell of grapes on our breath.
A willingness to be like Simon Peter who when Jesus asked, “Do you also want to go away” he answered by saying, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."



Believe it or not sometimes I wish we in the UCC were more like the Catholics; that we didn’t feel the need to keep the messiness of Jesus’ death, hidden away. But unfortunately too often we’re more like the disciples, forever denying that Jesus is actually going to die, wanting to keep him alive forever, because we can’t conceive of how we would live without him.
But Jesus asks the disciples, and us, to not plug our ears when he talks about how he is destined to die, and to not walk away when he teaches us something that we may not yet comprehend.

Jesus asks the disciples, and us, to trust that he will live on within us through the sacrament of the Eucharist. It is through the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine that Jesus enters into us, whether we believe it to be true figuratively or literally.


We can’t be true followers of Jesus unless we’re willing to get messy every once in awhile.
To be covered in dirt from head to toe, and to not deny it.
To climb to the top of the hill and slide down head first,
With grins on our faces, dirt in our ears, and scrapes on our knees.
And the joy of knowing that Jesus is leading the way.

Amen

Ruth

A long time member of our church passed away this week, at the age of 92.

I had never met Ruth, as she'd been homebound since before I joined the church four years ago.

Hers was just one of those names that floated in the periphery, her contributions and presence noted in passing and always in the past tense. She wasn’t a recently active member who had taken a spill and was temporarily out to pasture; she was officially off the radar screen. Her name was there every week in the church bulletin, in the “Please Keep In Your Prayers” section. But after seeing it week after week with no face to attach to its presence, no story to call up in its wake, the name became as ubiquitous as the note about the Pastor’s office hours and the plea for liturgists and ushers to sign up in the Martin Room.

I attended Ruth’s funeral yesterday; partly to find out more about a women who’d been a member of the church that I love for over 60 years, and partly to be there for those who knew her; to be that someone who hadn’t heard all the stories or been first hand witness to her ‘Christian presence,’ to be the newcomer who is willing to listen when those who were there need to share.

The church was only half full – on a hot Wednesday morning in August – and the elderly retired Pastor leading the service (the deceased’s brother) was a throwback to simpler times. He gestured wildly in the pulpit, made his voice carry into the balcony with little need for amplification, recited the scripture passage from memory, and spoke freely and frequently about the Grace of God and the need to claim Jesus as our own personal savior. He was an old-fashioned teacher-preacher, who punctuated his recitation of the scriptures with explanations of the text, and even stopped us mid-hymn – waving frantically to the organist – so he could explain the meaning of the verse we had just sung. The organist was his wife and he introduced each peace of music by saying “…and Mrs. Forbes will now play…” or “You may begin, Mrs. Forbes.”

In our tiny clapboard sided church with the windows wide open, the pastor’s elderly wife pumping the organ, and the black suited, small in stature Rev. Forbes holding court in the pulpit, it was if we had been transported to an early time.

As I had immersed myself earlier this past week in our church’s history in preparation for Anniversary Sunday, I left the church yesterday morning feeling as if I got a bit of a taste as to what it may have been like to sit in one of our pews in a much earlier time.

I love the way the church is now, and I have no desire to return to that earlier time when Rev. Forbes version of Christianity would have itched and restricted me like a hand-me-down Sunday dress – but it was nice to visit.

It was nice to step into Ruth’s world and get to know who she was, and to be with the people who loved and cared for her.

I learned that when conflicts arose at church meetings, Ruth was always the last to speak, and the congregation would inevitably choose to follow her wizened advice. I learned that Ruth was instrumental in getting our education wing built and she served on nearly every committee that we had. The Rev. Forbes also informed us that none of his sisters, Ruth included, was given a middle name. This was done in foresight that when they married they would carry on the family name as their middle name, keeping the ‘clan’ alive.

Family was what was most important to her.

After the service, I introduced myself to Rev. Forbes as a newer member and a current seminarian. He grasped my hand and pulled me in real close either to better hear me or because that’s just his style – up close and personal. He asked where I was attending school and when I told him he winked and said with a smile, “Nice school, but I didn’t go there, I’m a conservative you know.” Then he told me all about his radio program and his love of Jesus and wished me well in my studies, the whole time never letting go of my hand.

We were separated by 50 years, ideology, theology, and gender – and I’m pretty sure he had no idea that I was not heterosexual (I had left my “Future Gay Pastor” T-shirt at home) – but yesterday we were just two people, two Christians, who came together to celebrate the life of someone who loved our little church.

As we parted I made sure to mention to him that I HAD been given a middle name, to honor not my family but my mother, and that middle name is Ruth.

“Ahh, my favorite book in the Bible,” the Rev. Forbes said.

Indeed.